Social Media as a Tool to Promote Jyväskylä as A Tourism Destination

Abstract

Jyväskylä is the largest city in the Central Finland and Finnish Lakeland region. In digital era places and destinations compete against each other in an increasingly globalized market. To successfully compete, destinations need to work on developing a strong brand identity through effective positioning. The main goal of this work is to understand how social media platforms has been used to create / promote the Jyvaskyla brand. An exploratory qualitative study was developed to accomplish our goals. Data were collected and analysed until October 2024. We analyse all the hashtags in the social media Instagram, Facebook, Tik ToK and YouTube defined by the municipality of Jyvaskyla, namely, #jyväskylä #liikuntapääkaupunki, #capitalofsport, #tapahtumakaupunki, #opiskelijakaupunki, #visitjyväskyläregion, #visitjyvaskylaregion, #valonkaupunki, #cityoflight. Based on these hashtags, the posts created by users of these platforms were analysed, namely the content of the posts they associate with the city, the author of the publication and their geographical region, and the date of publication of the posts.  The data was collected using the platform Apify, and all the posts were analysed with content analysis to understand the main keywords associated with the brand Jyvaskyla. Moreover, posts were analysed using the sentiment analysis tool Benty.ai, which uses artificial intelligence to analyse the tone with which the text was written. Our preliminary results show the importance of the definition of a brand for the city as a marketing strategy.  When we regard the hashtags defined by municipality, they have the name of the city or associated the term “city” to the brand they want to promote, namely: sports, events, light or study. The current study provides valuable information on the current state of social media communication from stand points of branding and destination marketing. Also gives the opportunity to access and compare the effectiveness of these four platforms. Decision-makers needs to understand how to enhance the use of this technology to promote tourism destinations.